01.08.06

I am a collector of things. I don’t know why this should be, but it is a deeply ingrained part of my personality that I can not shake.

Among the things I collect are Books, Comic Books, Movies, Interesting Packaging and Pens.

Mostly, fountain pens, although I have been known to pick up the occasional roller ball and pencil. I love them. The funny thing is, I really don’t do all that much writing. Probably the most concentrated burst of writing for me comes when I am traveling and keeping a daily journal. But still, this hasn’t prevented me from acquiring pens at an alarming rate. Actually, I do quite a bit of sketching with them, and I think that’s probably where this whole thing started. I’m constantly in search of a better instrument.

Now I don’t tend to go in for super expensive pens, I think the most I’ve ever spent on a pen was $70 (a Rotring 600 series extra fine fountain pen that I bought from Levenger).

This was the first nice pen I bought and it served me well for years until something came loose in the cap and I put is a way for a while (I just last week sent it off to Rotring for repairs, we’ll see how that goes). As an aside, I recently bought another Rotring from Pen City when they had a sale clearing out all the discontinued Rotring products. This time with a fine nib. I tend to like an extra fine nib as my writing is pretty small. Unfortunately, most pens stop at fine.

So as I was saying, I don’t spend a lot for each pen, most of them were under $40, what I most look for is a cool design. I have a pretty good collection going so I’m going to do a series of posts on each pen with photo’s, writing samples and a quick review. I’ll start off next week with a couple of my most recent purchases from a Chinese company called Hero that I only learned about a few weeks ago.